


Early Light

by T Verano (t_verano)



Category: The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: 2012 TS Secret Santa Drabble Days prompt "frost", M/M, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-15
Updated: 2012-12-15
Packaged: 2020-04-06 07:00:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19057606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t_verano/pseuds/T%20Verano
Summary: Early light on a winter morning.





	Early Light

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2012 TS Secret Santa Drabble Days prompt "frost"

Blair mumbles something sleepy and incomprehensible when Jim slips out of bed at dawn. He's curled up beneath the quilt with even his face mostly submerged, but the top of his head is visible, and in the pale early light from the skylight it… sparkles.

Jim rubs his eyes for a moment, but the sparkle remains, tangled threads of silvery reflection caught in his hair, like —

Ah. Like the tinsel Jim dumped on Blair's head last night when they were decorating the tree. He glances over the railing down into the living room and yeah, there are glints of silver showing up all the fuck over the place. Hopefully he can talk Blair into not making a tinsel fight a new Christmas tradition; vacuuming all that shit up is going to be a bitch.

Not that it wasn't worth it.

He's smiling as he scrubs a hand through his hair and dusts himself off — he's not about to face the world out there _glittering_ — and gets dressed quietly. Five minutes later he's outside, jogging down Prospect to start an easy three-mile loop.

Five minutes after that he hits Clayborne Park and swerves off the sidewalk to jog through the grass. Then he stops.

It's not like he hasn't seen frost before, more times than he can count. But every blade of grass, every leaf on every tree here, is perfectly edged in silvery white. He has to clench his teeth to keep himself from letting his sight chase too deeply into any of the infinity of perfect crystalline structures edging upon perfect crystalline structures, edging upon…

A shift in the quality of light brings him back — only to nearly doom him again. The sun's risen far enough that its light is slanting in golden stripes through the branches of the trees at the back of the park, and the frost-edged world around Jim is on fire.

It's a world made of uncountable tiny diamonds made fierce by the sun; he's standing in a storm of light, an attack, a killing field of dazzling _glory._

Retreat is unthinkable.

Soon — too soon — the sun will be high enough, the air warm enough, that all of this will become ordinary grass blades and tree leaves, an ordinary patch of winter lawn in an ordinary city park.

For now, Jim stands and witnesses.

Twenty minutes later he's rounding the corner onto Shipwright Avenue, ten minutes from the loft, and he's smiling as he jogs.

It's not the same thing at all, but he's going home to a living room glittering in its own way — floor, couch, coffee table and God knows where else, not to mention the Christmas tree — and to Blair curled up in their bed with tinsel in his hair.

He cranks up the pace a little. So he's feeling a need to catch the early morning sunlight on some of that tinsel, maybe get a little… dazzled, again; he's pretty sure Blair won't mind. At all.


End file.
